Thomas Beckwith
is a staff writer for The Millions and an MFA candidate at Johns Hopkins. Prior to coming to Baltimore, he studied literature and worked in IT while living in Dublin, Ireland. You can find him on Twitter at @tdbeckwith.

Even though William Faulkner once described Hollywood as the "plastic asshole of the world," he spent two decades writing screenplays there. At Garden & Gun, John Meroneyexamines Faulkner's film career, including writing for Howard Hawks and having an affair with his secretary. Pair with: Our essay on Cormac McCarthy's attempt at screenwriting.

My "10 Best Songs Based on Books" list, from yesterday's Observer (UK), is up on the Guardian's website. Obviously it's not so much the 10 Best as the 10 Best I could think of while writing the list, but that kind of equivocation makes for terribly unsnappy titles.

Is all publicity good publicity? Are all reviews---even bad ones---good for books? The answer, according to a new study [pdf] by the journal Marketing Science, depends on whether the writer is well known or unknown. The study examined the impact of a New York Times review on the sales of more than 200 hardcover titles. For books by established writers, a negative review led to a 15% decrease in sales. For unknown authors, a negative review increased sales by a healthy 45%.